


I will recoil myself into the black and darkest night

by lanyon



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:02:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8882932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: Kieren Walker is coming home. His family reflects.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liliaeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liliaeth/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to Liliaeth! Thanks for the great prompt.  
> Big thanks to N, L and L for the cheerleading. Title from The Frames.  
> Warnings for mentions of (canon) suicide and violence.

**SUE**

 

It is not right to be jealous of a grave. 

The graveyard in Roarton is always cold. Even in the height of summer, it’s cold, and Kieren was not buried in the summer. He died in the winter and he rose in the winter, but he was born, living, breathing, wailing, _whole_ in the spring. A little rosebud of a boy. 

He was born in the spring. 

This grave, empty like a starving mouth, did not give birth to him. It was no womb.

They’ve said that Kieren is doing well. That he’s coming home. That he’s not a rotter anymore. 

Sue sounds out the word and it’s snatched away by the wind. _Rotter_. It trips off the tongue, whips off the tongue, so much easier than Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer, so much easier than _my late son_.

She has to leave the graveyard. They have to sell their house. They have to leave Roarton, if Kieren’s coming home. It’s not a friendly place, if it ever was, to a boy like Kieren, and now it is twice-unfriendly.

Carefully, she picks her way around fresh graves and empty graves and twice-filled graves and she is fiercely grateful.

This grave has taken everything from her and she doesn’t know what it has given back but she will take it. She will take him. She’s not sure if he’ll be warm, or cold. She’s not sure if his eyes will be brown, the way they used to be, muddy, tearful wells, or whether they’ll be flat. She’s not sure how much life will be in her unliving boy. 

She doesn’t mind if he’s unliving, as long as he is not unloving. He had such a heart, did her Kieren, and maybe it beats again and maybe it doesn’t, but Sue hopes that he can still love (even if love drove him to a dark cave).

Sue thinks that even if her boy, her rosebud of a boy, can not love, she can love enough for both of them.

 

**STEVE**

 

No one sits with Steve at lunch. He is not the life and soul of the break room anymore and he doesn’t mind that no one will meet his eyes except Dave, sometimes, who’ll remark on the cricket scores and smile toothlessly. 

Thanatophobia is a fear of death. It is not that Steve is afraid of dying but he is afraid of other people dying, and he is afraid of being powerless to stop them.

It is not an irrational fear. 

When he first met Sue, she was at the edge of a cliff. A pharmacy in a Yorkshire town is not a scene set for heroics, though Steve did pull her back from that cliff’s edge. 

He has not been afraid for Sue since then or, at least, no more than is usual for a man who loves his wife, and does not want her to walk home alone at night, and who read too many books about pregnancy to have anything but a healthy terror for the event. 

Sue lived, and she lives, and their children … well, their children live, in a manner of speaking. Jem lives in a nearly impenetrable cloud of doom and anger and Kieren ... 

Well, Steve could not pull Kieren back from his cliff. 

Kieren clawed his way back up (he clawed his way back out) and he is coming back and Steve has no idea what that might mean. There are pamphlets, and Steve reads them all (he reads the ones that Jem hasn’t burned) and there are a lot of words that mean very little.

Doctor Halperin has not let them see Kieren; they will see him when they go to collect him. They are to prepare themselves. He will be different, according to the pamphlets, _like any loved one who has recovered from a long illness_.

Oh, it’s been a long bleeding illness, make no mistake, of death and undeath, and Steve has not been able to save his son once.

He clenches his fist. 

He finishes his sandwich. Dave tells him that Glamorgan thrashed Worcestershire by an innings.

Steve goes back to work.

 

**JEM**

 

When they start calling it a syndrome, Jem starts to worry. 

Someone with a syndrome is unwell; they are not monsters. 

Someone with a syndrome needs tablets and injections and a quiet chair in a sunny corner of a nursing home. They should not be shot, and shot, and shot again until their sluggish blood stops entirely, no matter what Bill says. 

They get pamphlets through the front door. 

Jem starts to read one of them, about the reintegration of Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferers into society, and she crumples it up, suddenly furious. 

These rotters, these ex-men and ex-women and ex-brothers; they made a murderer out of her and she hates them for it.

She cannot think about Kieren, or about seeing him in the supermarket. Milk and eggs and sugar and the unrotting corpse of her brother, feeding on Lisa, with that other rotter in the ridiculous, mildewy dress. 

If Jem thinks about Kieren, she gets even angrier.

This is all his fault. If he hadn’t left them, if he hadn’t gone off to that cave and bled, Jem wouldn’t feel like this. He made a murderer out of her, and he made a coward out of her because she couldn’t kill him, even when he was already dead.

Her mum and dad sat her down and told her that Kieren was coming back. She couldn’t tell them that she knew, that she had seen him with blood around his mouth, with _Lisa’s_ blood around his mouth, somewhere between the family size bags of crisps and the Terry’s Chocolate Oranges.

Kieren is coming back and he is not a rotter and he suffers from a _syndrome_ and Jem takes out her lighter, which is bright pink and four years old from when she and Lisa decided to try smoking behind the bicycle sheds. She takes out her lighter and holds the pamphlet ( _NHS Choices: Partially Deceased Syndrome_ ) over the flame and she lets it burn and burn over the bathroom sink.

Her dad bangs on the door. “You better not be smoking in there, Jemina!”

There are worse things than cancer and lung disease, she thinks. There are worse things than angry parents. She swears softly as the flames reach her fingertips. There are worse things than burning and there are worse things than dying. 

Her brother’s coming home.


End file.
